Chapter 3
Visitors shouted in terror when Elisha Graves Otis demonstrated his newfangled “hoisting machine” at P.T. Barnum’s New York World’s Fair of 1853 to 1854. A domestic answer to the excess and exuberance of London’s 1851 Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, the New York fair was staged in its own glass-and-iron exhibition building, also named, like its cousin in London, the Crystal Palace. More than 15,000 panes of glass and 1,800 tons of iron went into the massive structure shaped like a Greek cross, topped by a 100-foot-diameter dome. It formed a proto-skyscraper that towered 123 feet above the city.
Located near the Croton Distributing Reservoir close to what is now Bryant Park on 42nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the glass edifice housed 6,000 objects of industry (compared to London’s 100,000 exhibits), a trove that included 654 paintings, just 31—a pointillist 0.047%—of which were formed by American hands.
If art was not to be the fair’s strong suit, technological advances—like house paint and mechanical contrivances such as the elevator—were. Otis, the elevator entrepreneur, proved his engineering marvel could defy gravity by raising it above the crowd—and then slashing the rope that had suspended it in the air.
With Otis crying out, “All safe, gentlemen. All safe,” the elevator stayed safely aloft, no less wondrously than a flying carpet, thanks to the ingenious safety mechanism. Up until then, the public had been leery of elevators, like the one carrying paying passengers up the adjacent Latting Observatory, a wooden tower soaring 315 feet.
Man had achieved a modest liftoff into the air since at least Archimedes, who improvised a lifting device run on ropes wrapped around a winding drum, not unlike the way we coil a garden hose. Later on, the Colosseum in Rome employed a system of 60 two-story capstans, used to raise the cages of animals and scenery sitting on hinged platforms measuring 12-by-15 feet into the impending carnage above. By 1835, an English factory employed a belt-driven elevator called the “teagle,” and in 1846, a hydraulic industrial lift powered by water pressure debuted.
But once in the air, they were all gravity’s plaything. If a rope or cable snapped, death or injury followed with depressing regularity.
In 1852, while Otis was working as a master mechanic for the Bedstead Manufacturing Co., he designed a freight elevator that would haul the company’s products upward. And it was here that Otis’s greatest contribution to this history of lifting and toting took place: a safety brake that sprang into action automatically the second the hoisting cable snapped. If such a disaster occurred, a ratchet immediately engaged, locking the platform into place and preventing it from plummeting with its human cargo.
Courtesy of Otis Elevator Company Historical Archives
But his ingenuity was almost beside the point. With its sales plunging like primitive elevators, Bedstead went out of business. Otis, preparing to head west to seek his fortune in the Gold Rush, picked up an unsolicited order from a New York furniture manufacturer for two of his “safety hoisters.” He stayed put, and his elevators started to move.
On March 23, 1857, three years after the fair had increased elevator awareness (if not sales) on a viral scale, Otis installed the country’s first passenger elevator in a New York City store at Broadway and Broome streets. By 1870, his company, Otis Brothers & Company (originally named the Union Elevator Works, to trade on his anti-slavery beliefs in liberal New York), was pulling in more than $1 million in sales, roughly equivalent to $25 million today. A couple of years later, in 1872, 2,000 Otis elevators were in use, lifting Americans to heights only matched by the eagle and Mercury.
Courtesy of Otis Elevator Company Historical Archives
In 1878, Otis’s hydraulic elevator improved speeds to 800 feet per minute, and he installed a governor-operated safety in another unit that would gradually slow a falling elevator in an emergency.
For all of Otis’s historic importance and its products’ ubiquity, few know its role at another world’s fair—lifting visitors to the heights of the Eiffel Tower.
For Paris’s Exposition Universelle of 1889, Eiffel faced a slew of unusual engineering challenges for this eponymous 1,063-foot wrought iron lattice tower: installing elevators that could move up an incline inside its curved legs. While nationalistic pressures forced Eiffel to use French-made elevators for two of the legs and the tower’s higher stages, Otis elevators served the other two legs. (Slightly more than a decade after this exhibition, the company lifted the world higher again, when it displayed its escalator at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris.) A century later, Otis was hired to update and renovate the elevators.
Today, there are roughly 2.6 million Otis elevators and escalators in more than 200 countries around the world. Over the last century, its products have appeared in eight of the ten structures that have held the title of “World’s Tallest,” an alpine assemblage including the Empire State Building and Burj Khalifa. Another estimate suggests its products move the equivalent of the world’s population—about 7.5 billion—every five days.
Those statistics, impressive as they are, are less extraordinary than the elevator’s safety record, which is a song of praise to engineering: An average of twenty-six people die in elevators each year in the United States, while 40,000 die annually in car accidents. (Most who die in elevator accidents are elevator technicians.) The ability to ensure reliably safe vertical transportation helped make possible the era of skyscrapers and a conquering of the heavens that rivaled the Wright brothers.